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Comment by samwillis | Hacker News Reader

I really don't like the tone of this post, particularly calling out a named employee for, as far as I can see, a perfectly fine response. It seems to me that the OP is the one who has taken an antagonistic tone on the feedback threads, even when GitHub are showing themselves as responsive to the feedback.

Go ahead and criticise a product, but don't call out an employee or make out that they are failing to fulfil your personal requirements.

I'm sure this is only a first version of the new GitHub search, and more features will come. Give them the benefit of the doubt.

I don't really understand why we are seeing more and more of these style of antagonistic blog posts (or comments here on HN).

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Colin here (I'm the "named employee"). I don't mind being called out, FWIW. I'm proud of what we built.

We would definitely have implemented sorting by recency if it was trivial to implement. But as I said before, our data shows that it is infrequently used, and to scale our search index, we designed it in a way that makes this kind of sorting tricky.

Sometimes to ship products like this, tradeoffs have to be made, and I continue to think we made the right one. Nevertheless, it's good for me and the team to hear feedback like this so we can continue to improve the product.

I dunno, I've had my fair share of "Can you elaborate on why you want to" as a blow off technique in my software career. This isn't helped by the GH engineer originally suggesting no one needs this, then another employee chiming in with "Yeah, sorry about that. We've heard this feedback a lot...".

I can perfectly understand the frustrations of the author - its kind of absurd someone working on a search feature needing the reasoning explained for why someone might want the most recent results, especially when the old search had this feature. I don't work at GH and I don't require "elaboration" for this request - I understood the OP perfectly.

It's notoriously hard to convey tone in written English, and I think the OP has read far too much into the response he initially had.

"Can you elaborate on why you want to" is an incredibly legitimate question in that sort of feedback thread, they are looking for use case.

Agreed, but it's not notoriously hard to understand why recent results is useful - the use case is self-evident, and the new search has regressed - the old search could do it.

Because one thing we know for sure is that a couple of people posting to an issue is definitely and completely representative of the community, no possible way that MS has analytics showing how often queries get made to back up a statement like “vast majority”.

Yeah, this post is needlessly adversarial and hard to take seriously for it.

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